This invention relates to an automatic mail processing apparatus, and more particularly, to an automatic mail processing apparatus adapted to a post office of a medium or small scale.
A conventional automatic mail processing apparatus is designed, as clearly stated in an article titled "AUTOMATIC MAIL FACING AND CANCELLING APPARATUS" published in the Technical Journal of Nippon Electric Company, Limited, No. 94, Aug. 1969, pp 24 - 29, and in another article titled "AUTOMATIC LETTER FACING" compiled in the proceedings of the CONFERENCE ON BRITISH POSTAL ENGINEERING published by The Institute of Mechanical Engineers, 1970, to be adapted for installation in a large-scale post office wherein forty or fifty thousand or more pieces of mail such as envelopes and postcards are processed a day. For this reason, these conventional apparatuses necessarily have a complicated mechanism and control function therefor, and require a large space for installation. This makes the apparatus as a whole more expensive and its maintenance work more complicated and costly.
On the other hand, it has become necessary to mechanize the mail processing in a medium- or a small-scale post office with a processing capacity of less than thirty thousand pieces of mail. Such post office does not usually have sufficient space for installation of a large scale apparatus such as the above-mentioned conventional mail handling apparatus requiring large space for installation. Furthermore, it is not economical for such a post office to use a mail handling apparatus with a high processing capacity, e.g., a high processing speed as in the conventional apparatus. A reduced cost of manufacture is more important for such use even if the processing capacity is considerably sacrificed.
It is, therefore, an object of this invention to provide an improved automatic mail processing apparatus with a simplified mechanism adapted to a medium or a small scale post office.